N64 Bottleneck

MSP430

I am quite curious what is the true bottleneck for N64 on the Pi.

GPU?
OpenGL ES 2.0? Would OpenGL 2.1 help? (experimental driver available)
RAM?
Raw CPU power? Would a multicore emulator work better?
Understanding how the N64 works?

quicksilver

@msp430 this question has been asked a lot. But the main issues with N64 emulation on the pi as I understand them are:

The GPU on the pi is very weak and really isn't up to the task.
The drivers for the GPU are outdated and can cause issues with some textures not rendering properly. From what I understand the opengl experimental drivers are not compatible with retropie currently.
The mupen64 emulator is not perfectly optimized for use on the pi.

dankcushions

gpu is slow and only supports GLES/open gl 2. open gl 2.1 isn’t different from gles in terms of featureset, and that’s what matters.

cpu/core use doesn’t matter because cpu is barely used with pi3 plus mupen64plus (thanks to the arm dynarec).

mupen64plus-gliden64 is fairly well optimised for pi at this point, in my view. ultimately the gpu’s lack of features doom it.

system bus speed is always probably a bottleneck but no amount of speed will get over the GLES/gl limitations.